Not the name to a new movie starring the Bolivian Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, but the state that Ing and I felt upon arriving in the world's highest city. This morning we had left Santiago, landed at Iquique on Chile's north desert coast and then flew into La Paz at 4000m 45 minutes later! Talk about a shock to the system. Just picking up the bags was a real effort! No wonder the aircraft was practically empty. Maybe the others knew something that we didn't?

But the flight from sea-level over the desert Andes was exhilarating! Far below and in the distance of the clear desert mountain air were the white salt flats; they looked like massive white lakes in between the dark of the surrounding mountains! Sliding down the starboard side of the plane were snow capped smoking volcanoes and other snow capped peaks! Where there was no snow, the desert landscape seemed buckled and eroded; bleak and timeless.

Climbing out of the aircraft at La Paz, the clarity of the air is impressive. It is not very often that the air is as clear as this and certainly not during the rainy season! Again we were blessed to have arrived when the weather allowed us to appreciate the full majesty of the snow capped peaks that tower over the city and are like sentinels protecting the approaches to the City of Peace.

But La Paz is like no other city anywhere in the world. Imagine a plain covered by houses and then suddenly the middle of plain collapses as if there is a sinkhole beneath it. That is what La Paz is like. The airport is located in what is actually Alto Cuidad (the high city) and when you take the local taxi (collectivo) down into the centre of the city, you see the rest of the city laid out beneath you with the residential suburbs clinging to the sides of the valley. Anywhere else in the world, the high elevations would be the preserve of the wealthy and the lower elevations would be left to the less wealthy. But in La Paz that trend is reversed. Higher up the valley and further from the city you go, the less financial you have.La Paz might well be the only city to have an airport significantly higher than the city centre!

But La Paz is surprising in more respects that just altitude and land value distribution. Here protests and strikes are a national past time. Every one of the three days we were in La Paz just trying to get our breathe back, there was one gathering of one kind or another! So used to the explosion of firecrackers do you become, that you don't even flinch when they seem to go off next to you. Those not protecting or striking or causing traffic disruption, seem to take these sort of things in their collective stride. What we later found out was that President Evo Morales had continued his more leftist/socialist agenda and the country's populace had returned a 61% approval of the new Constitution giving unprecedented rights to those that had been discriminated against under previous regimes! Power was swinging away from the powerful land owning elite and toward the impoverished and the government owning state assets of natural gas and oil!

Surprising was the mix of facial features of the hinting of colourful and exciting racial intermingling. Here is a place where the Ayamara Indian ladies still wear traditional dress of which the bowler hat is the most outstanding feature. They all looked like extras from a movie that was being filmed down the road. Wherever you look, they all had their brilliantly coloured shawls and blankets with them. Even when it rained, the ladies protected their bowler hats under a plastic shopping bag!

Time spent here was time acclimatising and just watching the world go by breathing in the oxygen depleted air. Everywhere we looked in La Paz, the people seemed without an edge. Unlike India or Kathmandu in Nepal, there was no mean streak in anybody. Everybody seemed happy to put up with our poor Spanish attempts....and they didn't bother speaking back in English! Magic! At no time did we feel that we were anything more than respected guests and not some high vaulted beings that needed to be deferred to. It was fantastic to be one of the crowd. Perhaps they knew that we were suffering from the altitude as we shuffled like the elderly from one area of the city to another!

We were looking forward to getting out of the cold and rain and high altitude to the warm and rain and lower altitudes in the jungles below.